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They're a subsidiary, not a studio. They are 100% owned by Activision Blizzard, but they are, financially, autonomous. In theory, at least. That means that Mike Morhaime theoretically sets the budget, and what remains in profit (i.e. lots) gets passed to the holding managed by Bobby K.

Overestimate, my ass I'd say. But the thing is, up until Cataclysm, they did 4 raiding tiers per expansion cycle. Vanilla: MC, BWL, AQ, Naxx BC: Karazhan/Gruul, SSC/TK, Hyjal/Temple, Sunwell LK: Naxx 2, Ulduar, Coliseum, Citadel LK is where they suddendly started to have problems...

Cataclysm. The expansion "tone" was supposed to be elemental, with the bosses of Air (Throne of 4 winds), Water (Abyssal Maw?), Fire (Firelands) and Earth (Neltharion aka Deathwing), thus 4 raid tiers like usual. Except they decided that 3 raid tiers were good anyway, and you didn't waste...

Ok, so no permadeath is planned. Or at least the designers didn't knew they did: https://twitter.com/Qixter/status/309445123001946112

Permadeath works "well" when none of the elements bound to your character is permanent. An example is Minecraft: there's a number of situations where death is complete. Fall into lava (or any situation where doing corpse recovery is impossible), you lose every single level of xp, and all of your...

Yes. And 3 months down, no one does it. So, by the same token, the devs should spend their time making... what exactly? Arguing that devs shouldn't do housing because "no one will care" (after a flurry of activity when the feature is introduced) is not a valid point because the raids and...

Nobody. But as long as you invest time (and thus, subs) to fill it, it does serve it's purpose as much as the LFR gear that no one cares about anyway either since it's going to be obsolete in 3 months.

There is another aspect we've not touched here, and it's the shape of the market. Subscription-based games are really, really hard to do today. Because they're not just competing with the handful of remaining sub-based games, but with the free-to-play. If you want a modernized EQ, that's the...

Isn't what we are discussing here opinions? Unless you have academic papers to point... Actually, no. I make distinction between features that matter for marketing and features that matter for a game. Features that matter for marketing lead to people trying your game. Features that matter for...

Zombie, man. Zombies.

Also, in GW2, when you're walking along city, you do overhear passerby commenting on various stuff (the weather, the market, etc). The problem is that, either it's some quest dialog, and you hear it exactly once, even though they spend hundred thousands of $ to record those, plus hours of...

Yea. And Skyrim is a huge MMO, right? "Full voice acting" is a feature of single-player RPGs. In a MMO, it's about the feature equivalent of "realistic graphics": something that's useful for the marketing, but should disappear from your mind once you play. Because, realistically, if you play...

That's the 'classic RPG, only with 100 people" mentality. You're the hero because in a single-player RPG, you are the hero. Just don't pay attention to the thousand heroes around you.

EQ's plat was pretty much the only market in 2001 when IGE started.

Don't tell me: the zone connects to a different zone every day?

The corrolary being that the amount of gear entering the game is unlimited. Which generates its own problems in cascade of solving one.

It does, if you have good enough loudspeakers pumping out near-subsonic bass.

What he meant is that the only real draw of the Star Wars game was the storied content (otherwise, it was essentially WoW redux). And once the story was exhausted, there was nothing left for the players to do (which is what you notice) and they left. If you all bank your game on...

The EVE solution is simple: you can do automated, but it takes slightly longer than manual, and leave you open to more risk. The automated pilot leaves you 5km from the gate, and you put-put to the gate before jumping, leaving you wide open to scan and gatecampers.

If you want a "minecraft MMO", you can apparently check Wurm Online, on which the creator of Minecraft worked (before creating Minecraft proper).

Minecraft has sold 20+ million copies. Granted, the price is a lot less than a MMO (notably the pocket edition), but the earnings are "kind of nice".

It's just that it hasn't changed much in over 4 years. That is enough to make me bored and unsubscribed, and unlikely to resubscribe until at least the next expansion (I don't see any real reason to check all the content patches). If I had never ever played WoW in 7 years, it would probably...

And therein lies the secret of a good crating system and functional economy. Your crafting system must be so that a relative majority of players aren't going to get into it. If it's too easy, then you get the WoW-type economies where the vast majority of players make most of their own stuff and...

And thus, there's no real need to limit people from using them. The topic is hotbar: you need a hotbar because... you need to be able to quickly use these skills, meaning they're for combat. Anything that occurs out of combat does not belong in a hotbar. You can have a section of your UI devoted...

You don't need a hotbar of non-combat utility. There is strictly no reason not to have access to all utilities that aren't combat-related. Unless you meant the TSW idea of a passive loadout, which is fine.

I blame this thread for giving me dreams that wake me up in the middle of the night. So I dreamed about SOE unveiling for Valentine's day (why Valentine's day? a gift?) a fully playable Everquest III "which is a completely different game from Everquest Next". A F2P kind of EQ1-GW mashup, with...

Well, in WoW, it has. It's called Valor points.

We haven't seen much of the Founding (their scenario creation tool) yet.

Preview fromMMORPG.com:

Two games at least had some of that. GW1 with signets. In GW1 (like TSW), you have a number of known actions, and you pick up to 8 to use in any given adventure. Some are free, some can be purchased, and the important ("elite") ones must be obtained by defeating the appropriate boss (some are...

Usually, that's because there's no one left alive who can rez, and everyone was supposed to hoof it back, not wait with his dick in his hands while the CR team was heading back.

And you forget to cross the Grey without enduring breath (which required you to know exactly how to go straight there, no wasted time, or you died again).

Remember more, yes. But it's the same way with, say, war. Everyone who experienced war, directly, remembers it. Vividly. But somehow, I don't think they really "enjoyed it more".

Ahhh, Steamfont with its Minotaur Hero and Meldrath...

What's more is that the primary aggroed mob (i.e. the one you hit or got too close to) would keep on propagating its aggro to any social mob he got close to. Fortunately, mobs that got aggro from another mob and were not hit by you would not propagate it.

I think the first MMO that was mostly quest-driven for (most of) its levelling was DAOC.

No. Unless he definitely had a different Zork than I did. I even have the Inforcom cheat book still on my shelves, which I purchased in frustration during my Zork III time...

Losing your body in Blackburrow next door could turn into hell. Fall down a hole, run around until you get swarmed. And when the bard finds your corpse in the middle of a wall, except it is in fact deep below (or above). Took me 2 days to recover it. A friend also had the same hole/shit...

Hmmm, can I have your copy of Zork that was a text-based UO? Because my copy of Zork (which, thank to virtual machines, can still be run on today's computers and OS) doesn't feel like that at all.

The battle is slowly making the news in non-gaming circles (as usually for a pretty exceptional EVE event or caper). http://io9.com/5980387/how-the-battl...o-game-history